It wasn't a day to explain things—not a day to talk. Men afield can never tell what they are doing; some devilish irony is in the air. They laugh; they listen; they hope—only a jest comes. The most thrilling and stupendous situations bring forth but a curse or a roar. Human throats are inarticulate, afield; the reality that voices heroic utterance and makes it memorable is not at work in man-fabric; splendid faces and brave actions—but the words are the revealers of emptiness. For the animal is awake and upstanding; the spirit that quickens reality is apart.
The battlefield opened to Mowbray's eyes that day with abnormal clearness, as if he had brought rest and reflection to a problem that long had harried him, He felt singularly light and full of ease—as one does sometimes in the first hours of the day after a sleepless night. The day was wild with west wind, a touch of south still clinging. The east arrayed itself again and again in all the delicate blends of pink and gray, watery yellow, rose, and azure; a different arrangement at each glance, as if separate groups of maidens followed each around a Roman bath.
Samarc was given a seat in an ammunition wagon, with orders to join his battery. Peter found his horse, already saddled by Boylan, and overtook the wagon train as it left the town. In a halt for the way to clear, Kohlvihr and his staff passed, Dabnitz and Boylan riding together. The General sat soft and lumpy in the saddle, his eyes small and feverish, his face hotly red. The staff passed on, all except Boylan believing that the correspondent had fallen in behind. Riding with the wagons, Peter frequently turned to the terrifying bandage above the steward's blouse. When the light was right, he caught a glint of the eyes beneath.
The way became steep for the wagons as they neared the emplacements. Peter swung off and led his pony. Infantry was already engaged down in the hollows; the reek of powder began to cut the air at intervals, but the strong wind as often cleansed it away, and the scent of woods came up startlingly, with the warmth of the sun upon the ground—the sweet healing breath of drying cedar boughs.
He was sorry now he had roughed it with the young doctor; that sort of thing was very far from him. He had no memory of another episode like it. On occasion, dropping into the queerest abstractions, he fancied her near.... It had been like a soldier leaving his lady for the battle—the precious few minutes less than an hour ago. She had promised to be with him. There had been no talk nor thought of the terrifying day she faced in the hospital; everything had to do with his taking the field. She would follow him with her thoughts. Perhaps he would find his soul out there, she suggested, as he had never found it before. Peter wondered now just what she meant by that. It was not his way to fall back upon any such abstraction.
He reflected how her presence always changed him, gave him strength of a different sort, and directness of aim.... It was true that she seemed near—on the other side from Samarc—a part of the mountain fragrance that would not be overpowered in the gun-reek. He felt if he could turn quickly enough he would catch the gleam of her colors. This was her country. She was of the north and the cold lands; she belonged to the purity of the cedars.
He played with the thought that she was near; and from the thought, because it was good, a glimpse of the future came to him—the peace to come, when men would dwell again with their loves, and the dream of superb affiliation would come true. All this madness of men would pass, as the rising powder-reek would pass from these Galician hills, and leave them their silence and their natural fragrance.
The wagons had gone on. Samarc's battery might have been rubbed out for all their ability to find it. All faces strange—gunners, range-finders, and the cartridge hands. Peter felt a horror in his breast for the immediate presence of the guns—as if he had reached the end of toleration in the one day with them. Samarc felt this hate, too, his ruling passion.... Any moment one of the rapid-firers might drum into action. Their sense was one—that something would be uncoupled in their minds. They turned, Peter laughing at his desire to run—as they found another group of machines emplaced in a rocky shelter a little higher than the spot where the shrapnel had struck three days before.
No one called to them as they turned back. A small belated wagon train rumbled by, but no one hailed them from the seats. They were free, alone. Peter inhaled the scent of the forest, sharp again from the acrid taint of the cool, hazy air. He loved the sweet mountain wind as never before—almost as if he were to leave it all. There was little need of exchange of words. Each understood mainly the thoughts of the other. Big guns thundered at each other from the remoter hills. Again they saw an infantry movement start forth below—the endless strings of infantry along the broad lower slopes. They stopped to watch them.
Creatures of the hollows, their business to rise and be swept back—marching forth now—Kohlvihr's command. Peter's eyes filled and his throat stopped at the spectacle of the gray lines. Surely something was the matter with him, he thought. Was it pathological—loss of sleep, or fatigue? Or was it something that Spenski and Abel, the field and hospital; more than all was it something that Berthe Wyndham had given him? In any event, it seemed as if those infantry lines marching out now to the burning front were being torn from his own breast, every moujik precious. He wanted to be with them, not with the heinous guns. He wished he could spare them, stop the continual sacrifice. Miles of gray lines moving out now. ...His companion's tugging hand.